apocalypse

One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the US population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

Sure, at some level scientists know nanobots will destroy mankind. They just can't resist seeing how it happens.

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun.("Ephemera")

Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes.

Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon."]

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.

You know what? Fuck it. Just fuck it. The Rising didn't manage to wipe out the human race, it just made us turn into even bigger assholes than we were before. Hear that, mad science? You failed. You were supposed to kill us all, and instead you turned us into monsters.

Time for the world to end.

Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to spanWhen it gathers to egg once more

There are ruins all over the world, testaments of the atrocities, and burial chambers of the lost souls. But the facts are always misinterpreted. History is inaccurate.

To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes - to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute. There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth -- and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.

In the first couple of weeks there were big piles of trash outside every house. All the stuff you couldn__ find another use for and couldn__ compost. Yogurt cups, torn trash bags, dirty diapers, hair-spray cans, paper towels. Sometimes you__ see a pile that was as high as your waist. Nathan said it was a purge, a cleanse. But you could just as well say that who we were went out with the empties. We will never get our selves back.

You think you__e prepared. You think you__e done everything you__e supposed to, study hard, work hard, keep yourself out of trouble, and then__hoosh! Something arrives out of the blue that you never saw coming. Something you never even imagined. Something that__l knock your little world off its axis. Something that__l either change your life for the better, or end it forever. Chaos.

The hugest changes were the ones that could not be seen _ that__ where the real apocalypse lay: in people__ hearts, their souls, their beings.

Thank God for imminent doomsday.

One could speculate that lichens would be among the last inhabitants to succumb on a dying earth at some distant point in the future.